#239: Taking Care of Yourself

Taking Care of Yourself

Hello. How are you doing today? I wanna talk to you about taking care of yourself, and I don't wanna talk just about what it means to do all the things we think we should do to take care of ourselves, right? Like, well, we should be eating healthy and we should be exercising. Although those are great ways to take care of yourself.

I wanna talk to you about the things that we don't even think about that aren't even on our radar because our brain doesn't let us go there.

We have to consciously take our brain there. And so I want to do that with you today. This will be something that will make your life infinitely better. This is especially relevant during the holidays when I know a lot of people I talk to feel blah. That's the <laugh>, the general feeling.

I hear from people, they feel blah, they don't wanna do anything. They barely want to decorate their tree. And this is something that does not have to be de facto true. You can change this, but our brain doesn't think we can. It thinks that we just feel that way, that it's the season, that it's the way things are right now, that it's because you're working all the time.

Why Sometimes We Feel “Blah”

What really is happening is that we are forgetting how to think consciously about what we need. This is something that our lives like we, it's so easy to get caught up in the work. It's so easy to forget, to take care of ourselves, to forget the little things that we need so that we enjoy this life. And that is ultimately what we are here to do, is to learn how to love better, including loving ourselves better. And you know, each of us has our own lessons.

Each of us has our own things that we are learning in this particular lifetime. And what I wanna share with you is that one of those things is how to take care of yourself, not to take care of other people better, right?

We're not taking care of ourselves to take care of other people better. We're doing it because we love ourselves.

A great byproduct of that is that if you want to be able to take care of others better, you are giving from a full cup. You are not giving from depletion.

The First Step

So this is what I mean by this. If you are feeling blah right now, if you, if your brain is telling you things like I don't feel like doing anything, it doesn't feel like the holidays.

I don't enjoy the way I'm feeling right now. I haven't had fun in a long time. I don't know how to have fun. My life doesn't feel like fun. If your brain is giving you any flavor of that, I wanna offer you that.

The Questions to Ask Yourself

The next step is to ask yourself, what sounds like fun? What can I do to take care of myself better?

Start shifting the focus of your brain. Because when you do that, you're gonna start noticing some things. You're going to start noticing that you aren't actively going out and finding fun. If we are not thinking that we are fun and that we can find fun and that we can make fun happen, we're not going to look for it actively. So ask yourself what sounds like fun?

Notice What Your Brain Says to You

And the first thing your brain is gonna tell you is, I don't know, <laugh>.

So what you have to do is you have to override this, right? Like that's what our prefrontal cortex is for, is to say, okay, I see you're telling me that. I don't know, but what if I did know? And it's amazing when I ask my clients, what if you did know or if you had to guess, they come up with all kinds of answers. That's because we have all of the answers.

So ask yourself, what sounds like fun for me this morning? What sounded like fun for me? Was recording this on a walk with you? Well, not really with you with my dog, but you know what I mean. And I asked myself, what else sounded fun? You know what sounds fun? Dance classes. I wanna go to dance classes. I wanna go to hip hop classes. What else sounds fun? Oh, taking guitar lessons again, that sounds like fun. I wanna do that.

When You Re-Focus Your Brain, Taking Care of Yourself Becomes Easier

So when I started focusing my brain on what sounded like fun and ignored, the automatic thought that's gonna pop up, which is, I don't know, I found all kinds of things. You know what else sounds like fun? Casey and the Sunshine Band, love listening to them. I like to listen to that music whenever I want a little pep up, right? So ask yourself, what sounds like fun to you? And then what else I started doing is I started asking myself, you know, what do I want right now? Just what do I want? And again, your brain is gonna say, ah, I don't know. Let's think about this later. We don't. This isn't necessary because of course it's not necessary to do things like take guitar lessons or go to dance classes. None of that is necessary. Nobody needs to do that.

But it's fun, right? And I wanna do it. You know what else I wanna do? I wanna take such good care of myself that I don't need anybody else to, I don't need to expect anybody else to do things for me, right? Like, I don't expect anybody to buy me flowers or anything like that. Would that be nice? Sure. But what I do and what I want are pretty flowers in my house. So I buy flowers for myself or do things for myself, like, you know, put lotion on my feet. <Laugh>.

We Must Actively Thinking About Taking Care of Ourselves

I mean, it can be really simple things, but it's things that we ignore because we're not actively thinking about how we can take better care of ourselves. Like we settle and we don't prioritize ourselves. We don't look at how we can take better care of ourselves. And we focus all of our attention on what we think is the most important thing, which is work.

But it only takes five minutes to do some of the things that I'm talking about. You don't have to actively go out and take lessons. You don't have to schedule walks or anything like that. Although scheduling fun is amazing because then you know you've committed to it. That's why I love scheduling the dance classes, because it's on my calendar. I've made space for it.

Questions to Ask Yourself

Same thing with scheduling coffee dates with my girlfriends, right? Like, I love doing that because it's on my calendar. It's a time I know I get to spend with them, and I love spending time with them. What else sounds good to you? What sounds fun? What do you want? Right? Maybe you want to polish your nails, right? Maybe you want to buy some new makeup, right? Whatever it is, consider this. You get to do that. It's not something that is a requirement, but dang, doesn't it make our life better when we start to incorporate things that make our lives richer and fuller and more fun and joyful?

What lights you up? What have you been putting off? What do you keep telling yourself that one day you'll do? Because one day you are gonna get to the end and you are not going to wish that you had billed more hours. <Laugh>, you are not going to wish that you had spent more time at the office. You are going to wish that you took care of yourself and you got to do all the fun things that you always thought about doing. And yes, there are big things like travel and all of that, which I love.

And there are also the little things like making yourself the best cup of coffee in the morning instead of settling for some crappy coffee or doing things for yourself, like having a cute little breakfast nook. Just because you wanna sit there and sip your coffee, like you get to do these things for yourself.

Those are little things that add up and they show ourselves that we love ourselves.

They show ourselves that we matter, because you do matter.

What you want matters.

What you enjoy matters.

You are important.

Treat yourself like you are important.

When you start treating yourself like you are important, you are going to notice that things shift for you. You no longer feel blah, you no longer feel like you don't wanna do anything, right? Your brain might still do that every so often. It may want to tell you things like, I don't feel like it.

I don't want to. Those are signals that you might not be taking care of yourself. And that's an opportunity to check in and ask yourself, what do I need right now? What do I want right now? What sounds fun to me? And I hope that this finds you in a place where you are.

Well, I know that if you're listening to this, you have the means to take care of yourself, right? You are a lawyer who may be working really hard right now, and you may be balancing things like work and the holidays, family, but I wanna offer to you that you can still make time in all of that to take care of yourself. It may be five minutes, right?

And it may require you to do things that are uncomfortable and that are foreign to you, like asking for help so that you can have time to yourself to do what you need. That's something that I work with my clients with a lot. It's just sometimes the simple act of asking someone for help. And when they learn to feel that discomfort and ask anyway, they make the time that they need to take care of themselves. So if that's something that you need, I encourage you to do it.

All right, my friend, I hope you have a wonderful day. And if this resonates with you, book a call with me. Go to dina cataldo.com/strategy session. You will learn the skills that you need to take care of yourself to give yourself what you need. And when you do that, you begin to calm the overwhelm. You begin to find more time in your day, not just to do all the things that you wanna do, but also to create the practice that you want to really sit down and think about your future.

And when you get to think about your future and you really start to get conscious about how you wanna design your life, about what you wanna do for the rest of your life, about how you want to live fully fulfilled, everything starts to change. Not just the little things, although the little things are amazing, but you just start to live a bigger life. And I want that for you.

If that's something that you want to work with me on, go to https://dinacataldo.com/strategysession. All right, my friend, I'll talk to you soon. Bye.